I recently purchased my first house here in the Bay Area, and I did it in a decidedly non-traditional way.  For a few years I had been reading about a smaller real estate company known as Redfin which operated in a more hands-off way than a normal real estate firm.  Redfin leverages technology and a slick user interface to help its users (most of which will not use Redfin to buy a home, but the search feature is that good) find homes on their own.  Once a house is purchased, Redfin actually refunds some of the brokerage commission.  In most places, 3% of the purchase prices goes to the seller’s agent, 3% to the buyers, and 1.5%, 50% of Redfin’s commission, goes back to the end user.  So… what’s the catch?